One day my daughter and I drove North from Denver for a day trip to the Pawnee National Grasslands. The last thing on my mind was picking up another dog. I was already traveling with one dog and three cats, waiting on a house to close that was doing its best not to. I didn’t have any nerves left for another animal. But fate had other ideas...
Somewhere in a sea of farmland and grassy fields we came to a tiny little town that was just a crossroads. On one corner, there was a small trailer that served as a liquor store. My daughter had to go to the bathroom, so I pulled in.
She came back to the truck after a bit and said that the lady who was at the register had heard Bluebell barking and commented that she had a hound dog she was trying to get rid of. The poor woman had a baby on the hip and one on the way, and just flat out didn’t have patience for a dog that chewed up the baby toys. She rattled off a whole list of bad things that he did. To make a long story short, we drove out of that town with six little jars of moonshine and an extra dog.
My daughter wanted to name the dog ‘Liquor Store Larry’. I thought ‘Moonshine Marley’. He ended up ‘Buck’, which I liked since it rendered a plethora of nicknames: Bucky, Buck-a-roo, Buckarino, Buckster, etc…
Buck turned out to be a great dog. So good, in fact, that I am inclined to believe in fate. If you had told me that morning I would be returning with another dog, I would have said: NO thank you. As it turned out, we needed him and he needed us, and so we met that fateful day, with a little help from Bluebell, in the middle of gosh darned nowhere.
Update: Buck, so sweet and gentle, is now the sentinel of our new house. He hangs out front and sounds the alarm when something is up. Unfortunately, sometimes he sounds the alarm late at night when the coyotes take up to yappin’, then stays out there for hours keeping them at bay.
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